In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers-Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak-working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new understanding of the political resonances that result from it.

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin reveals how Yiddish literature participated in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, how active Yiddish writers were in the literary scene, and how German-speaking Jews read descriptions of Yiddish-speaking Jews to uncover the emotional complexity of what they managed to create even in the midst of their confusion and ambivalence in Germany.

Caplan's masterful narrative affords new insights into literary form, Jewish culture, and the philosophical and psychological motivations for aesthetic modernism.

About the Author

Marc Caplan is Visiting Professor in the Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. He is author of How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms.

Reviews

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin is full of sharp insights and bold statements, which at times can raise incidental doubts in the reader's mind. Caplan's book is a work of creative critical research on modern Yiddish literature, particularly well-suited to the contemporary historical moment.

* Forward Magazine *

Caplan [is] mindful of and likely alarmed by the parallels between the 2020s and the 1920s, and rightly draw our attention to works of art and literature that might help us navigate our own troubled era.

* LA Review of Books *

Caplan's work is a sprawling, at times idiosyncratic, rich, and deeply earnest study of modernist aesthetics and the political, social, artistic, and literary contexts that inform them from the vantage points of center and periphery.

-- Jessica Kirzane * AJS Review *

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin is a remarkable work of critical imagination that stages a conversation between Yiddish and German modernism.

-- Matthew Johnson * German Studies Review *

Caplan's work is a sprawling, at times idiosyncratic,rich, and deeply earnest stu y of modernist aesthetics and the political, social, artistic, and lit rary contexts that inform them from the vantage points of center and periphery.

-- Jessica Kirzane - The University of Chicago

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin is a remarkable work of critical imagination that stages a conversation between Yiddish and German modernism. In lively and often memorable prose, Caplan analyzes "the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture, concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, taken in comparison with corresponding figures working in German-language literature, critical theory, journalism, and film.

-- Matthew Johnson * German Studies Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253052001
Author Marc Caplan
Format Paperback
Page Count 394
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 576g